From 0 to 100: How to Grow Your Social Media

We have all seen the super successful marketing campaigns that netted the companies responsible thousands of new followers. Those campaigns from companies who are so big, it is almost impossible to send out a post or campaign that does not do well. But what about those who do not have many followers? Those who may only have 10, 50, or 100 followers, but still are looking to grow their following. Today, we will talk about how I helped grow social media channels from almost zero followers, and the things I noticed worked, worked kind of well, and things that did not work at all.

Hi, my name is Brian Yorke, and I have grown channels like Everything's Ok, and Marketing Association at UVU, from stagnant, repetitive channels to channels with active followings and increased viewership.

To start, let's examine things I did that resulted in an increase in overall viewership. To start, focus on content you know has preformed well. Too many companies worry too much about variety in their content, and regard successes as a one off. To achieve consistent success, one needs to find the content that their audience engages and responds well to, and then keep using that same content over and over again. Yes, there may be a time where the content no longer gains new viewership, or maybe even causes a dip, but until that happens, using similar content over and over is one of the best things you can do.

While growing the Everything's Ok channel, one thing I noticed, is that the posts that got a lot more views were posts where there was some sort of video aspect to it. Thus, I pivoted, and instead of just using text-based posts, I started a variety of text based and video based content. This change, although small, resulted in an increase in views and followers of the channel. While some posts were averaging 10-20 views, video based views increased to 100-130 views. While not everyone may find success using video based content, this story serves as an example to find what your channel does well, better than anyone else, and use that to your advantage to gain viewership and an advantage over other people.

Something that worked well, but overall did not have the intended effect, was commenting on others posts. While there are exceptions in every case, in the case of Everything's Ok, commenting consistently did not lead to an increase in followers or viewership. While we did see some increased interaction with our comments, that is where the interaction stopped. Those people did not go on to then view the page, or look at any of our other posts. While it is good to build a community, and find like minded induvial, as those people may be of help further down the line, these comments early on did not lead to many more followers or engagement beyond the original comment.

Finally, let's address some strategies that we tried, but did not lead to overall success. The first failure occurred when jumping onto modern trends. Make no mistake, using modern trends to increase your follower count is a tried-and-true method that many companies have used to increase their following. However, when deciding on which trends to do, make sure those trends are in line, either with the content you already produce, or with the content you wish to produce. While acting as Vice President of Social Media for the Marketing Association, we recorded a video hoping to capitalize on the viral trend of "How many visitors do you think we will get today." However, trouble soon arose as the content produced was not in the overall spirit of the trend, and thus, did not gain traction and was not received well by out audience. This is not to say the Marketing Association has not had success following other trends, but be careful that the trends you choose to go after line up well with what your company represents. Failure to keep this in mind could result in lost followers, or lost traction.

Overall, marketing is all about learning. You are going to make mistakes. You are going to go and do things that, in hindsight, were not the smartest. But that is how you grow. The point, is to make sure those mistakes you make are not repeated over and over again. You need to learn from your mistakes, and keep moving forward.

What is your journey like? Let us know down in the comments below!